Liquid crystal display devices having a configuration including a liquid crystal display element disposed between paired substrates such as glass substrates have characteristics such as a thin profile, lightweight, and low power consumption. These characteristics have made the devices essential to products used in daily life and business, such as automotive navigation systems, electronic books, digital photo frames, industrial equipment, televisions, personal computers, smartphones, and tablet computers. For liquid crystal display devices for use in these applications, various modes have been considered which relate to the electrode arrangement and substrate design for changes in the optical characteristics of the liquid crystal layer.
Recent liquid crystal display devices employ a display mode such as a vertical alignment (VA) mode which aligns liquid crystal molecules having negative anisotropy of dielectric constant in perpendicular to the substrate surface; an in-plane switching (IPS) mode which aligns liquid crystal molecules having positive or negative anisotropy of dielectric constant in parallel with the substrate surfaces and applies transverse electric fields to the liquid crystal layer; and a fringe field switching (FFS) mode.
For example, Patent Literature 1 discloses an FFS-mode liquid crystal display device comprising: a first and a second transparent insulating substrates arranged opposite to each other with a predetermined distance, with a liquid crystal layer including a plurality of liquid crystal molecules interposed between them; a plurality of gate bus lines and data bus lines formed on the first transparent substrate and arranged in a matrix form to define a unit pixel; a thin film transistor formed at the intersection of the gate bus line and the data bus line; a counter electrode disposed in each unit pixel, made of transparent conductor; and a pixel electrode arranged in each unit pixel to generate a fringe field with the counter electrode, being insulated with the counter electrode and made of transparent conductor and including a plurality of upper slits and lower slits symmetrical each other with respect to long side of the pixel with a predetermined tilted angle.